Free Republic

Former Obama economic advisor, Clinton Secretary of Labor, and Berkely Prof. Robert Reich claimed yesterday in his column at Salon.com that Fox News played a role in the conservative resurgence of 1994: In December 1994, Bill Clinton proposed a so-called middle-class bill of rights including more tax credits for families with children, expanded retirement accounts, and tax-deductible college tuition. Clinton had lost his battle for healthcare reform. Even worse, by that time the Dems had lost the House and Senate. Washington was riding a huge anti-incumbent wave. Right-wing populists were the ascendancy, with Newt Gingrich and Fox News leading the...

Anita Dunn may be gone from the White House but her successor feels the same way she did about Fox News. From TVNewser The White House has a new communications director -- Dan Pfeiffer -- but the message is the same when it comes to Fox News Channel. During a video interview today with The New York Times' The Caucus blog, Pfeiffer was clear about the White House position on Fox News: "I have the same view of Fox that Anita [Dunn] had, which is that Fox is not a traditional news organization. They have a point of view. That...

Back in October, the Obama administration set image of the presidency back at least fifty by taking on Fox News and losing. It started with then White House communications director Anita Dunn saying that Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (White House code meaning in the Tank for Obama), David Axelrod declared Fox "not really a news station." And Chief of Staff Emanuel told the other networks not to follow Fox. It all ended when the White House tried to exclude Fox from an interview with pay czar Kenneth Feinberg...

The White House communications director is lobbing new firebombs at Fox News, saying it is not "a traditional news organization" and won't be treated as equal to other news networks. The remarks by Dan Pfeiffer, who recently replaced Anita Dunn as the White House communications director, indicate that the administration has no plans to back off its strident anti-Fox News rhetoric. Pfeiffer told The New York Times: "They have a point of view; that point of view pervades the entire network." He added that the Obama administration has no intention of treating Fox News equally. "We don't feel the obligation...

Officials: Anita Dunn may be leaving with her little red book, but her husband enters as the next White House counsel, bringing experience in suppressing dissent, assaulting the First Amendment and limiting speech. Dunn, whose favorite philosophers include mass murderer Mao Zedong, was expected to leave after a short stint. She rose to fame as chief strategist for former Senate majority leader, now national health care guru, Tom Daschle. While serving as White House communications director, she was the commanding general of the administration "war" on Fox News. Like her philosophical mentor, Mao, and her colleague, FCC diversity czar Mark...

The White House just lost its chief media strategist and Fox News just lost its best P.R. tool. Anita Dunn, the outspoken and controversial communications aide to President Obama has announced today that she'll be leaving her post; her deputy, Dan Pfeiffer is to replace her. Though Dunn's title was communications director, at times, "Fox News Basher" seemed more appropriate as she seemingly and bizarrely began to publicly wage war on the network roughly a month ago. Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news," Dunn snapped, which ignited the White House attacks on Fox News' journalism. When asked further to...

Reporting from Washington - At least one Democratic political strategist has gotten a blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel, an outlet that presidential aides have depicted as not so much a news-gathering operation as a political opponent bent on damaging the Obama administration. Political consultants are a staple of cable television talk shows, analyzing current events based on their own experiences working on campaigns or in government. One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox, he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be...

We need to make some big numbers on this thing. Fox may not be perfect, but its the best we have in terms of Television.

Freep this poll the White House is accusing Fox News of not being a legitimate source of news, calling them biased, etc. They have tried to block Fox reporters from news conferences, etc., but the other news networks are fighting back (in favor of Fox) and caused the White House to back down. NPR has put a survey online for us to voice our opinion. If you want to vote in this survey, go to the link below and cast your vote. Currently it is 71% in favor of the White House, but there are not that many votes ............

The White House is tapping out in its war with Fox News Channel. Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs met with FNC senior vice-president Michael Clemente today, and agreed to call a truce. The White House will no longer criticize cable's top-ranked news channel.

Nothing to fear—yet Gene Lyons Nobody should be surprised to see the nation’s esteemed celebrity news media align with FOX News against the White House, although even a cynical observer like me found the unanimity mildly shocking. Don’t they remember what journalism was supposed to be? Supposedly, the press regulates its own behavior. In reality, that’s been a joke for two decades. “Claiming the moral authority of a code of professional ethics it idealizes in the abstract but repudiates in practice,” I wrote in 2003, “today’s Washington press corps has grown as decadent and self-protective as any politician or interest...

To some who rarely watch it, it's both mysterious and outrageous that the Fox News TV channel dominates its cable TV rivals in ratings, and keeps growing. The prejudice and mind-set against Fox is mainly among those who consider themselves intellectually elite but who, in fact, are less informed about what's going on in the world than ... than Fox viewers. Fox's supremacy over its main competitors, CNN and MSNBC, grates on the lib-left. But for most of this 21st century, Fox News has proven the fairest and balanced of TV channels, both in hard news coverage and commentary. Those...

Here is video of White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett on CNN telling Campbell Brown that Fox News is biased. Campbell Brown asked Jarrett "do you think Fox News is biased?" She answered "of course they're biased." Brown then asked her "do you also think that MSNBC is biased?" She avoided the question and would not say that MSNBC is biased.

The term "narcissistic rage" gets 26,000 citations in Google Scholar. It is a common feature of extreme or pathological narcissism. While psychiatrists often say they can't do long-distance diagnosis, it really isn't that hard if you have a lot of information about a person and can watch how he operates from day to day. Intelligence agencies around the world have psychiatric staffs for exactly that purpose. While most people are pretty hard to predict, extreme narcissists are comparatively simple. They constantly hunger for ego gratification, they are immature, constantly need to demonstrate their own superiority, often need endless sexual conquests...

Grayson: “You know…FOX News and their Republican collaborators are the enemy of America. They’re the enemy of anybody who cares about health care in this country, the enemy of anybody who cares about educating their children, the enemy of everybody who wants energy independence, anything … good for this country. And they’re certainly the enemy of peace, there’s no doubt about that. They ARE the enemy.”I’ve seen people like Alan Grayson, the Democratic Representative from Florida’s 8th Congressional District, before. For example, I once attended an event held by Michigan Congressman John Conyers in the southern, suburban, part of his...

Barack Obama's war on Fox News Channel is paying huge dividends. For Fox News. While Obama's approval numbers are sinking below the 50 percent mark, FNC's ratings are higher than ever. Two weeks ago, the Obama White House began its assault on Fox News Channel, with communications director Anita Dunn calling the channel a "research arm of the Republican Party." Since that time, FNC's ratings are up almost 10 percent. Even more important, the ratings leaped 14 percent in the coveted 25-54 year old demographic. Glenn Beck, who is particularly despised by the thin-skinned Obama administration, now owns the second...

Herb Denenberg, once Pennsylvania's Commissioner of Insurance and a Professor at the Wharton School, describes in The Bulletin, how the whiff of fascism in this Administration is turning into the stench of fascism. He starts with a reminder of the many ways Obama has acted to stifle opposition views and manipulate public opinion and concludes: I've emphasized one aspect of fascism -- its objective of the forcible suppression of opposition. But it also qualifies under the other elements, including the suppression of private enterprise and putting it under centralized government control. That is one hallmark of the Obama Administration, it...

It’s a nine-percent bump in the two weeks since Anita Dunn’s whine heard ’round the world — in terms of overall audience. Among the coveted 25-54 demographic? A 14-percent bump. Good work, Barry. People keep telling me that this PR offensive by the White House benefits both sides but I don’t see how that’s true. If the goal is to contain Fox by framing the stories it breaks — Van Jones, ACORN, etc — as somehow illegitimate, then every tenth of a point that Fox’s ratings go up undermines that goal. There will come a point where other news nets...

In the most overt ploy yet to control the media the Obama Administration attempted to prevent FOX News from interviewing Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg on Thursday. At the same time the White House granted permission to interview Feinberg to CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC. This came on the heels of David Axelrod’s appearance on ABC’s This Week where he asserted that FOX was not a real news organization urging that other authentic news organizations such as ABC “ought not to treat them that way”. This is simply a continuation of strategies derived from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in which Rule 5 of the...

There is no greater waste of time in the Obama White House than its war against Fox News, because it doesn't just make this President look bad, it makes him look as if the other side has cut him down to size. He would be better off trying bowling again. At least this is one war Barack Obama can end easily. All he has to do is sit down with Chris Wallace or Shepard Smith - do the President's men think Smith was some arm of the Republican Party with his reporting on Hurricane Katrina? - or Major Garrett, a...